Pics
It looked just like the queues you get outside Apple stores. But we were in South Of The River – in deepest Southwark – where Apple doesn't set foot. What was going on?
The answer was that OnePlus, a Shenzen-based phone "startup" – read on for an explanation of the scare quotes – was offering fanbois a glimpse at its new phone …

Britain’s first home-brewed open source-based DAB multiplex has gone live this morning. Six services will be operating on the new mux in Brighton for nine months.
It’s less than three years since Small Scale DAB – which was conceived in a shed and generates its signal using low cost Raspberry Pi computers – was first tested, …

The web has grown up without letting people own and control their own stuff, but a British-backed initiative might change all that, offering a glimpse of how the internet can work in the future. Their work will all be open sourced early next year.
Britain's much-anticipated Copyright Hub was given ministerial blessing when it …

Mailbag
“Clearly the first year of ‘free’ is really beta testing – what should a sensible IT manager do?” asks one Reg reader Down Under. I’ve heard this from a few of you and collected your thoughts.
You’ve no doubt already read Tim Anderson’s review and Trevor Pott's sysadmin’s view. There are plenty of other concerns and questions …

Analysis
BBC please take note: Sky’s decision to play Netflix at its own game seems to be paying off.
Sky decided to “unbundle” itself two years ago, offering access to its content to anyone with an internet connection and a credit card via NOW TV, an OTT (over-the-top) offering.
It previously bundled content with access and …

British inventor Andrew Fentem has come up with a way of cheaply turning fabric into large active displays.
Fentem, who pioneered multitouch input technology 15 years ago, only to see a UK quango squander the innovation and Apple reap the reward, calls the new display “organic pixels”.
He’s invented an ulta-thin magnetic …

Hands On
The traditional flagship Android smartphone concept, as offered for instance by Samsung, may be feeling a little wobblier today after Motorola shelled it fore and aft with its new, actual-value X handsets.
Apple is currently hoovering up 92 per cent of the profits to be made in the smartphone business, by some counts, and what …

Windows will run Android binaries "unchanged", according to a Microsoft job posting.
"Project Astoria" is one of several ambitious ventures announced at Microsoft's annual developer conference Build 2015, intended to lure iOS, Android, and web developers to Windows 10. All were intended to make porting to Windows easy.
New …

It isn’t just Microsoft that’s going on a drastic phone diet. BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen today indicated that the Canadian enterprise vendor would cut its device portfolio from the four devices previously promised for 2015 to “two or one” a year.
“We are reducing jobs, but it is not so much as reducing; we are shifting it, so …

BlackBerry shed some light on its latest acquisition target, AtHoc, today. It looks an improbable fit at first: AtHoc does crisis comms for emergency services and campuses, and its big customers include the military, the Department of Homeland Security and the DoD.
Speaking at BlackBerry’s annual security summit in New York, …

Review
I love what Eric Migovsky has done with the Pebble by creating an antidote to modern smartwatches. The two generations of Pebble so far have been useful, durable and practical – qualities which elude the over-specced and costly Apple and Android kit.
Pebble Time
Pebble Time: Fit for purpose
With its early mover advantage, …

In Depth
After five years, the radical design experiment of Windows Phone is to end; Windows on phones is being subsumed into Windows 10, and alas, this means Windows phones will not only be less distinctive and inherit many of the flaws, but they’ll acquires some flaws no mobile platform today suffers.
That’s my conclusion after …

The UK's inability to introduce a private copying copyright exception legally and fairly means home taping, ripping CDs and so on will remain technically illegal in the UK.
The obstacle to sorting out British law in this regard is the government's insistence that it can fix the quirk without offering any sort of compensation …

Analysis
A subscription-access BBC isn’t a new idea, and for its advocates, it’s a natural evolution that ensures the survival of the Corporation in the modern world. Yet Minister for Fun John Whittingdale kicked the idea down the road yesterday.
Whittingdale explained that for "conditional access" to work, non-subscribers would have …

The Government has opened up a wide-ranging consultation on the future of the BBC, whose ten-year duration Royal Charter expires in 2017.
Inside the BBC Micro
From this ...
Coincidentally a Government review of the criminalisation of license fee evasion, was also published today, the Perry Review, which has decided to …

Satya Nadella has been hitting the road to undo the damage to perceptions of Microsoft's mobile strategy caused last week by, um… Satya Nadella.
When the Great Communicator "clarified" Microsoft's plans last week, he was so effective that many reporters and analysts assumed Microsoft was giving up on its own mobile platforms, …

Ordinary people value their online reputations, and are the main users of the so-called "right to be forgotten" European ruling, Google data has revealed.
Google has portrayed its obligation to follow European privacy law, affirmed by the Gonzalez vs Google Spain ruling at the European Court of Justice last year, as a rogue's …

Analysis
Yes, Nokia will probably make Nokia-brand phones again. And other people will make them for Nokia. The company has just re-reaffirmed the strategy it announced at its Capital Markets Day last November - when nobody seemed to be paying close attention.
In fact Nokia said so again in April - as we reported here.
Quite why it …

Exclusive
Former Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps, who lost his Cabinet seat after allegations sourced from Wikimedia UK were widely publicised during the 2015 General Election campaign, has filed a request under the Data Protection Act to find out what the organisation knows and wrote about him.
While the BBC has (sort of) …

The European Parliament's largest grouping of MEPs, the European People's Party group, has snuffed out a bogus copyright crusade. The centre-right EPP, which has 214 MEPs, slammed inaccurate media reports for suggesting that new copyright laws would "break the internet".
"There is no such EU law on the table and it is highly …

It's been a great week for the BBC. The Corporation has expanded the Telly Tax onto computers and, on top of that, gained a guarantee of annual inflation-rate increases in the television licence fee. These cancel out the new requirement that the BBC funds free TV for the over-75s, which it must do in full from 2020.
As a bonus …

Microsoft's CEO has attempted to explain the future of its mobile platform in a latest public statement addressed to staff. But, this being Satya Nadella, such is the verbal haze that it's hard to make out what on Earth's going on.
Nadella's language is becoming a real problem for Microsoft, creating uncertainty where clarity …

Analysis
HTC's financial figures for its second quarter of 2015 look horrific. HTC says it lost 24 cents (or pence) for every dollar (or pound) of revenue it received. After four quarters of slender profits, the business just fell off a cliff.
The Taiwanese giant's share price has halved from £146.5 ($224.63) to £68.50 ($105.03). If …

Analysis
New BlackBerry handsets are coming with unrecognized part numbers, which were spotted on an Indian import database.
Three weeks ago, Reuters reported that new models from the company would run Android – raising question marks over BlackBerry's own proprietary BlackBerry OS 10 (BB10) platform. In the absence of a rapid …

In depth
Every time I've looked at Windows 10, it hasn't been long before I've run away screaming. As recently as May the ISO was nowhere near ready for prime time. Testing Windows 10 seemed to me like volunteering to be an unpaid drug trial guinea pig – it would be painful and could potentially give you horrible side effects, and you …

The BPI reckons music consumption rose four per cent in the first half of 2015, thanks to a string of best-selling albums.
But how do you measure an album's sales when a lot of your audience is streaming, or has YouTube on in the background?
The music industry has started to use a new metric it calls Album Equivalent Sale ( …

Just as we predicted only yesterday, Wikipedia has proclaimed a famous “victory” over something that was never going to happen.
The site launched a high-profile campaign to “Save the Freedom of Panorama”, after an amendment was tacked onto a European Parliament report produced by the Parliament’s only Pirate MEP. The amendment …

If you thought that British TV drama was getting cheaper and there was less of it, Ofcom has just confirmed your hunch.
Ofcom's first (since 1998) review of Public Service Broadcasters, or PSBs, the regulated terrestrial TV dinosaurs, has found three things you already knew.
Namely, that British TV companies now spend less …

Wikipedia has launched another anti-copyright campaign – but it's one that experts say is bogus and misleading. Thousands of pages on the site are now plastered with an appeal to "Save the Freedom of Panorama", a crusade minted by copyright activist and Europe's only Pirate Party MEP, Julia Reda.
But Wikipedia users should …

Attorneys General representing 40 US states have filed an amicus brief backing Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood's investigation into Google.
In December, the giant multinational sued the state of Mississippi after it had opened an investigation into Google's business practices (claiming Hood’s complaints did not come under …

The BBC has apologised to MP and former Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps for the way it reported allegations regarding Shapps and Wikipedia, which were based on a single anonymous source.
Shapps lost the position of party chairman and left the Cabinet, despite running a successful general election campaign. He is …

Analysis
A key pillar of the EU’s “Digital Single Market” strategy has systemic flaws and EU officials should stop using it, say researchers who analysed the dossier.
The IP Growth Index of the Lisbon Council think tank was prepared by council fellow Benjamin Gibert.
But it is “a showcase of methodological blunder”, according to an …

The compulsory TV tax could be divvied up and given to Shoreditch digital types to create “compelling digital content”, says Shoreditch property developer and former No 10 special advisor Rohan Silva.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Silva called for “a new media fund that invests in private companies producing innovative digital …

Google’s favourable treatment of its own services results in consumer harm and will make the web less diverse, a study into search engine users’ behaviour has claimed.
Heavyweight law prof Tim Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality”, is one of the authors of the study, which was supported by data from Yelp, a Google rival.
“ …

Review
Huawei’s P8 has finally rolled into UK shops, the latest wave of China’s assault on Tier One Android flagships.
Huawei P8 Huawei's P8: set to give South Korean phone makers sleepless nights
If you don’t know the Huawei proposition, here it is. You won’t get all the bells and whistles from a phone that arrives on a £40-£50 …

Comment
Google appears to be "complying" with the so-called European "right to be forgotten" ruling in a way which has helped convicted criminals to give their reputations an unexpected boost.
We know this from media organisations which have helpfully listed the stories Google won’t return in its search results. The Telegraph does so …

As 10 Downing Street was establishing a Behavioural Insights Team, or "Nudge" unit, based on pop psychology, so too were the spooks at GCHQ.
Clearly not wishing to be left out of the behavioural craze sweeping the chattering classes and the thinkfluencers in the ad world, spooks thought they should be brought up to speed on the …

Teenaged* German MEP Julia Reda, who believes that “your life is illegal” because of copyright laws, has successfully conned a gullible newspaper into reporting that sharing your own photos will soon be illegal too.
The Telegraph’s skiing expert ran a story suggesting that British holidaymakers “may face legal action” for …

BlackBerry CEO John Chen told shareholders at his company's AGM today that he’ll stay in the handset business as he reckons he has a good chance at making money from it.
Chen didn’t say how: whether he’d stick doggedly to BlackBerry’s own BB10, flirt with Android, or bring them both into a hypervisor-enabled cohabitation …

Rising software revenue helped make up for continuing falls in phone hardware income at BlackBerry in the past quarter, with the waning giant booking revenue of $658m for first quarter of full year 2016, and reported a non-GAAP operating loss of $7m.
Forty per cent of all income was phone sales, of around 1.1 million devices. …

Analysis
Tech oligarchs aren’t supposed to say sorry. And no, Apple hasn’t formally apologized to the music community for demanding that it works for Apple for free, Apple still comes out of it with plenty of credit.
Ten days ago, the contracts for Apple’s new Spotify-ish streaming service leaked out, and they contained an unprecedented …

Page File
Twenty years ago we thought the music industry would disappear and something fairer would take its place, as sure as eggs was eggs. We were right about the first part – but I doubt anyone predicted the new Man would be worse than the old Man.
How did we get a system that's actually less ethical than an industry that was founded …

The British music industry has dealt a significant legal blow to the UK government – after the law was tweaked to allow Brits to copy audio CDs without another penny going to musicians and labels.
Blighty's record industry, unhappy with these changes, today successfully applied [PDF] for a judicial review, meaning a judge will …

Interview + update
The European Parliament this week made one of its strangest ever decisions, endorsing the replacement of the European cultural tradition with American ideas.
Author and academic Robert Levine thinks Pirate MEP Julia Reda’s copyright reform* proposals are the policy equivalent of photo-bombing, and MEPs haven’t really twigged …

A judge will decide whether a fishing expedition by Google to uncover, and then request, documents protected by client-attorney privilege is legitimate, in the latest twist of the Mississippi Saga.
Mississippi is one of several states wanting to find out whether Google has complied with a 2011 legal agreement with federal …

Comment
The leadership of Nokia phones shuffled out of Microsoft yesterday, with phones VP Jo Harlow joining former CEO and Microsoft devices VP Stephen Elop in the taxi queue. The traffic wasn’t all one way: Meego UX guy Peter Skillman has joined Microsoft from Nokia’s HERE division.
The moves are a result of a corporate reshuffle …

Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge* has declared war on “oldmedia”, which he spells as one word. His Falconwing News service will pump out three-sentence “stories” scraped from real news sources and posted as images. Advertisers will be able to inject their ads into this stream.
He vows that he’ll pay writers “better” than “ …

The independent music sector may opt-out of Apple Music – at least for its launch – because of the decision by the $731bn-valued giant to pay musicians and composers the big fat round sum of $0 for music streamed during the three-month trial period.
Allied to anxieties about cash flow, it means Apple Music could roll out on June …

Google doesn’t always take the threat of anti-trust charges too seriously. After the Wall Street Journal implied that the FTC opted for less aggressive action against Google because of political pressure, Google responded with references to a laughing baby, and by personally attacking the newspaper’s owner.
After all, when you’ …

Interview
Ex-Reg man Ashlee Vance has written a warts-and-all bio of Elon Musk. We quizzed him on how he did it – and why.
Reg: This book has an interesting genesis – Musk wouldn’t co-operate, so you decided to do it anyway. Then he agreed to interviews...
Vance: I probably benefited from Elon turning me down, because it totally pissed …